One way to illuminate a woody path is to attach a lamp
to a wooden post and nestle it into a tree. Far from fooling
anyone, however, this attempt at concealment is weak at best, and ugly
to boot.

Along other paths the lamp itself adds to the impression of
beauty. A good street light should be, after all, not just a
source of light but a sculpture that illuminates.
Instead, most
streetlights are not only pure utility
but suck huge amounts of electricity.

Stick a 500 watt lamp in a street light and plunk it on an
aluminum pole and plant that poll on a street corner. Count up
the street corners in a small town and you quickly consume
hundreds of ugly kilowatts just illuminating empty streets all night.
Could we save electrify by detecting movement and only lighting
up when a car or person was present? Or what if pedestrians had
to carry their own lights, much like cars are required to have
headlights for nighttime travel? Or what if
LED bulbs could be used
in streetlights?

This reminds me of the upstream battle with locks.
Normally, lock keepers are among the most helpful people in France. They
will catch your ropes when tossed and help you cleat your boats. This
is most appreciated, especially when traveling light handed in a canal
boat. But for some reason, over Easter week, the lock keepers on the
Canal du Midi, to a man, refused to touch a rope.

The one exception was the young girl pictured here by Dr. Carter.
She took our lines, cleated them, and ran the boat through the lock.
She also closed the place up at the end of the day. Her Grandpa was
very impressed by the 2 euro tip she received.

Nothing can compare to good lighting to separate one component
from another
in a photograph.
One sometime, however, moves out of the light and into the shadows.
Here, for example, a tall church blocked all the sunlight
from this side of the building.

Normally such an image would hit the trash because of its
lack of separation. But here, the colors serve the same
purpose that light would have normally served. The purple flower canopy
accented by yellow splashes soften the cold stone and
allow the dark wood of the tree to move forward. An accidental
photo that turned out well.

While driving north on a French freeway, somewhere near the eastern outskirts of Paris,
I noticed a fire. Struck by the bright blue sky, dark smoke, greenery, and the red and white
fire ladder that so nicely framed everything, I grabbed my handy camera and shot this photo.
Bryan Costale Friday 4 May 2007

This serves as a lesson why you should always keep your camera at the ready.
You never know when you might drive up on a great shot. Ducks waddling along
the center of a freeway, a tanker truck flipped on an overpass, or a great
smile from the car next to yours. Try to never find that great shot when your
camera uselessly left at home.

In the old days of film and optical printing there were few ways
to fix a marred photograph.
Burning, dodging,
and cropping were
were the techniques available and were
limited to rather crude repairs. In these modern times, a photographer
can fix a marred photograph using Photoshop. With Photoshop the
degree of repair is fine-tuned right down to individual pixels.

One photographer I know would not display this image without first
spending 10 minutes erasing the telephone wire
at the right. I, on the
other hand, prefer to retain the wire. The presence of the wire
signals to the viewer that this bridge is associated
with civilization. France is woefully backward when it comes to
putting wires underground. With the wire, the viewer experiences a different
metaphor than the viewer would experience without the wire.

We at bcx.news stand for honest photography.

Allan Woods, Sunday 6 May 2007

So, if I take a digital color image and REMOVE the color information,
am I creating a "more truthful" lie?

Modification of the image is what photography is. You cannot draw a
clear line between what is "alteration" and what is not.

Once you begin to object to making a picture more esthetically
pleasing by removing distracting wires (which are neither the subject
of the image nor prominent enough to make some point) you start down
a path which has no end, nor any point.

Dr. William Carter, Monday 7 May 2007

Re: "With the wire, the viewer experiences a
different metaphor than the viewer would
experience without the wire.
We at bcx.news stand for honest photography"

All photography is an abstraction; both of time and space.

One's choice of format, lens focal length, plane
of focus, depth of field, overall exposure,
duration of exposure, color saturation; the use
of swings, tilts, rises, and falls; 3-D vs. 2-D,
method of 3-D; medium of display: The sum
of these and other elements contribute to a final
representation of some highly editorialized
viewfinder selection of a, mute, cold, simplistic
splinter of reality. Insensate and contextually
deprived.

As Goddard might have you believe, film is not
"truth, 24 times a second". That's a nice
sound-bite, but it's a lie.

Is B&W inherently less honest than color?

Is 2-D inherently less honest than 3-D?

Is my photo of "a window across the street"
(Windows2006_08.jpg)
inherently dishonest
because I digitally applied a swing, rise, and
tilt to compensate for the distorting effect of
keystoning... or is it more honest?

Is removing non-essential distractions from a
shot; say, something like, oh, I don't know,
powerlines from behind a photo of Terry, being
dishonest? I think that would be more honest,
certainly more honest to the craft.

Were Titian's reds "honest"? Rembrandt's
lighting "honest"? When Michelangelo carved the
statue "David", he did so in a disproportionate
way so that it would appear proportional when
viewed from below. Was he being dishonest? Were
Cezanne, VanGogh, Degas, Monet all dishonest?

Photography is a vehicle of communication. "Reality" is not it's domain.

Given the tools we have today, I think it's poor
photography not to consider using them. Or just
laziness. Or an absurdly obdurate and obtrusive
notion that a photograph is, somehow, "real."

No question that the French can cut the mustard.
Bryan Costales, Sunday 6 May 2007

In fact many fine mustards come from France where
perhaps the best known is Dijon.

In America,
there too are mustard fields. In America the most infamous of the
American mustards is French's, a pale yellow mustard. French's Mustard
is not French, nor is it owned by the French.
Instead it is owned by the British firm Reckitt Benckiser PLC.
It is named French's because its founder was named Robert T. French.

The walled castle at Carcassonne, called the
Cité,
lies about two kilometers from the canal at the south east end of
Carcassonne. After wrestling lines upstream through single, double,
and triple locks, we were too pooped to walk all the way to the castle.

Fortunately, I had a 500mm lens that allowed me to grab a picture of
it from the top of a bridge
over the river. Next year we will perhaps take a
train to Carcassonne
and actually visit the castle. In the meanwhile, be forewarned
that going upstream on a canal boat can be exhausting to those of us
baby boomers still fit enough to travel.

In France, the black plague
lasted through 1349.
In enclosed places such as monasteries, the infection of one person usually meant the
infection of all. In the
Franciscan convent of Carcassonne
every monk died.
Amid the death and fear of contagion, people died without last rites
and were buried without prayers,
a prospect that terrified the Christians.
In Paris the estimated death rate reached 800 per day.

During the 1300's, Europe
lost half of its total population.
Is it any wonder that the graveyards of Europe are so full?

Three of us sat on the back of the boat as the sun quietly
set. The wind died leaving the water glass still.
We shot this same boat at different times using different lenses on
different cameras. Some of these shots were good and will appear elsewhere,
later on this site. Some were flawed and discarded.
This shot was selected because it illustrates
an important lesson.

Whenever you find the perfect subject in imperfect light, try to
wait patiently for the
light to mature.
Dr. Carter waited. The sun
began to set causing shadows to lengthen and shift. The wind
died and rain had not yet started to fall. When the light was right,
Dr. Carter shot.

When we got to Trebes, we decided to not tie up in the main
marina because of some noisy Spaniards. Instead we motored to the
edge of town where we found this dirt road. Although the road
appears to run into town, it actually (like so many roads in
Europe) does not go where it appears to.

Instead, following his road takes one to a set of private vegetable
gardens on the town's outskirts. Past the gardens is a major road
perpendicular to this that actually runs into town. Despite the narrowness
of this dirt road, one car did speed out it at a good clip.
So beware all cars, no matter how dinky the road or how placid the scene.

While docked in Le Somail, we worried as the weather
clouded and began to rain. We cut our photo outing short
to escape, and from the safety of the boat shot ducks and
folks also escaping
the rain.

From the next boat ahead a British gentleman and his wife emerged
to untie and cast off. We had a friendly chat with them about
the canals in England, which are narrower. His scowl in this shot
is not actually from the rain, but from having his picture taken.

Heavy rain is difficult to capture in the country without
some sort of backlight to make it stand out. In the city,
rain is easy because street and building lights help isolate
rain from the background.
Unusual puddles
also say rain, but not on a canal. Hints like an umbrella
also help. But there was nothing to help on the canal that evening
until another boat pulled up to the shore.

The dappling of rain on the water, the glisten of the boat, the fading
of the trees, and the slight tilt leeward of the boat all say "rain"
perfectly.

I am sure there is more of a story here than Dr. Carter admits.
The sign says that individual liberty is preferred over gathering
the community into one. Why is this sign next to a decorated
container building? Where was this photo taken? Other than the two
objects creating a natural joke, why should we care?

While wandering through one of the former outdoor statuary gardens
(now covered with a glass roof) we noticed what appeared to be
a film being shot inside the museum. We became quiet and walked
softly up to watch. With an internal bolt of surprise we realized
the boom operator was actually a statue. We'd been fooled.

When old sculpture is mixed with new,
the effect is produced
by the juxtaposition, rather than by the work of the actual
artists. In this way, a museum acts itself as an artist. We saw
no sign explaining why the boom operator had been placed just there,
but then we were so surprised we probably didn't look carefully.
This sculpture in a museum of modern art would have had a much
different effect.

This is the sign for the Cafe Dame Tartine,
a restaurant that has a reputation for being expensive.
Notice the dessert, a créme brulée with pistachio.
The exchange rate at the time equated €6 to about
U.S. $12. Clearly, the expense of this cafe encouraged the establishment of many
fast-food stands
to litter the garden grounds.

Unlike most of Paris, this garden offered a sprinkling of
food places all within an easy walk of the others. But
venture outside the garden to the streets and the story changes.
In Paris, on the right bank,
restaurants cluster on busy corners. One can walk two or
more long blocks before finding a cluster of restaurants.
When hungry, this spacing lends the impression of a desert
of restaurants. Imagine that. Stuck in Paris and not a restaurant
to be found.

In France, the work week is 35 hours. As a consequence, restaurants
are only open for lunch until 2:00 p.m., then close and don't open
again until 7:00 p.m. for dinner. If, as many Americans do, you get
hungry at 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. you are out of luck. The only alternatives
are the small markets, gas stations (for sandwiches), or fast food
outlets like McDonalds. Fortunately, near the train stations, one can
often find ethnic food open at all times.

Small parks surround the vast gardens along the right
bank of the Siene. Some, such as the one shown here, are
visible to, and frequented by, tourists. Others are more
hidden, such as another small park we later found that snaked
along the path leading to a pedestrian underpass.

We expected to break from the unusual heat that day by hiding in the shade of the
snaking park. Instead, we found all the benches there crusted with years of
bird droppings. The few people we saw all sat
on spread newspapers. Lacking newspapers we dared not sit.
Contrast that park to the
upper and more publically visible park (shown here) which had clean benches.

Now it could be that the snaking park was, in fact, a problem park frequented
by derelicts and drunks. If so, the presence of bird-dropping encrusted
benches makes a certain amount of sense as a preventive measure. But in a
city so proud of itself, such a technique is shameful. And if it is not
a technique after all, but instead poor maintenance, it is double shameful.

Not visable from this shot is the roadway on the left that travels
down the middle of the esplanade. That roadway is a very busy one.
Consequently, despite the pastoral look of these grassy areas, those areas
were quite noisy with the sounds of traffic.

Dispite the traffic, the grassy areas were full of people
that day because of the clear skies and hot tempertures.
Some people toyed with socker balls while most others lounged
on the grass.

In this regard the French are much like people everywhere.
Nice weather draws nearly everyone into the great outdoors.
Where the French excell, however, is by the beautiful
trappings with which they surround those who venture out.

This carrousel airplane was made to honor Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and
his famous book The Litte Prince (Le Petit Prince). I must admit that I
did not notice the whimsical detail of the feathered wings until seeing
the photo at home. At the time I just wanted to record another instance
of how the French love to honor their well-known artists.

For example there is a street named
Rue de Victor Hugo in almost every village we visited.

French writer Jules Verne
wrote the novel Around the World in Eighty Days wherein a part of the trip
was by hot air balloon after the unfortunate loss of hydrogen. To a child spinning
around on a carrousel the balloon reflects that spririt of circumnavagation.
The look on the faces of these girls reminds one of "the half-deflated
balloon caught in the rapid current, [as it] plunged like a great bubble off the
Guina Falls."

Of course the mother watching would never wish such a calamity on her
children. For her, it is just a gentle spring day in the park. A carrousel
slowly turns to the tinkle of piped music. Birds fly overhead. A fine and
relaxed day in Carcassonne.

It is difficult to describe the sheer immensity of this cemetery,
but perhaps a few facts will help. Pere Lachaise cemetery
currently houses about 300,000
dead compared to Iceland's 301,000 living (the dead are more
compact). The cemetery is 188 acres (48 hectares) or about the size
of roughly 100 American football fields. The interesting thing about
this photograph of a
long row of graves is that this path only runs a short way into the
cemetery.

By another measure, we spent three hours touring and photographing
the cemetery and calculate that we only viewed perhaps one tenth
of the graves. If you go, plan at least a week to see it all.

The Bay to Breakers race has been labeled over the years with
epithets ranging from crazy drunks
to tasteless nudes. From its
beginning in 1912 (to raise spirits after the 1906 earthquake), this
race has grown in attendance consistantly over the years to become one of the
world's largest races. In recent years alone, the number of participants has
reached roughly 80,000. During World War II the number slipped below 50, whereas
during the running boom of the 80s it hit a high of 110,000 in 1986.

Despite the evolution of
nude runners, this race
has matured into a fun event for all ages. Even
babys in strollers
can particpate,
albeit pushed by their parents. Indeed, what Herb Caen once called
"the city's longest running party," has evolved over the years into a fine event
enjoyed by all.

One might get the impression from the pictures we take, that most
of the boats on French canals are for rent. In actuality, many are
owned by local folk who
live aboard
their boats.
Living aboard is an more time intensive undertaking than renting. One typically
rents for from seven to fourteen days. Leasing to live aboard involves stays
of months at a time.

Organizations, such as the Barge Association
can be helpful to
those seeking an live aboard situation. Live aboard craft can vary from
the tiny boats, such as shown here, to large barges.
If you are interested in buying a boat, one place to look is
Apollo Duck.
Or if you are more interested in just trying out a large barge, try
Canals of France.

All throughout Europe, houses have shutters. Shutters serve
two purposes, first to protect windows from storm damage, and second
to mask sunlight so that a room may be made dark during the day.
Perhaps because of this latter property, it seems most often that
the only interior window coverings are shears.

In this early morning shot, the sun has just cleared the tree tops
and is shining brightly into this home. Perhaps inside a man sees
the sunlight streaming in and decides today will be a fine day indeed.
But, because this is France, the man probably thinks that thought in
French.

Dr. William Carter, Friday 25 May 2007

Shutters also serve to insulate (energy prices are high here)... and,
they aid in keeping the Caliphates out

While on a walk back from the Aquarium on a rainy afternoon, we
stumbled across these plastic stars stuck in the top of a stump.
We puzzled over them for several minutes but could not guess what
they might be. Further down the trail we found a pair of
abandoned sun glasses
and, in a blink, the mystery was solved.

Such revelations are sadly rare. More often, one will find something strange, puzzle
over it, and never solve what it might have been. Such found object, re-abandoned,
are quickly forgotten. But sometimes, found objects are collected, and sometimes
found objects are turned into art.
And, these day, a found object can be shot with a cell phone and messaged to a friend
for identification.

The Tate Museum
in Britain makes a kid's game out of found art. Others turn unknown objects
into a science. And yet others turn lost objects into a
photo essay.

The esplanade at the foot of Sather Tower,
also called the Campanile, provides a romantic
setting. But, lurking behind the folks depicted here, lies a Sather Tower
filled with
bones.

Four floors store fossils, and a fifth stores patent copies from the Library.
As a student, I worked in
Doe Library's
periodical room.
I would occasionally go up Sather Tower to fetch a
patent book.
The elevator, in those day,
had a metal gate that allowed one to view floor contents
as the elevator rose. Not only did I see fossils on the lower floors, but
I also witnessed tableaus.
Inventive students,
it seems,
created mini-scenes using fossil bones, for the entertainment
of all who rode the elevator.

Perhaps it was these jovial juxtapositions of bones that led later
to such hair-brained sites as
creationism.org.
One must be careful with the jokes one plays. Today's joke may lead, decades
later, to the fall of society.

Here we show cars number 5 and 27 of the Powel and Market to Hyde and Beach
line. These are single ended cars that have to be rotated at each end.
To learn more than you thought you might ever want to know about
San Francisco's cable cars, click on
the
Cable Car Museum.
If you visit San Francisco and want to ride the cable cars, we recommend
doing so before 7:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m. when the
cable car fare
is just $US 1.00.

Just one short block up the hill from these cable cars is
the proported origin of Irish Coffee at the
Buena Vista Cafe.
Irish Coffee is simple to make. Just mix 1.5 oz. Irish whiskey
with 1 tsp. sugar and six oz. of coffee. Then float cold cream
on top but don't mix it in. At the Buena Vista Cafe you'll pay
$US 6.50 apiece for this drink.

Now that you know how to make an Irish Coffee, why not kick back
and make one tonight. Have a sip and toast the Cable Cars.

From this picture it is clear that the English know how to
give water to a dog. As any sane person knows, you just fill
a bowl with cool tap water and man's-best-friend will lap it down
joyfully.

We here in the States have grown accustomed to
drinking water in flavors. Not only that, but we now look to
water for vitamins as well.
But wait, that ain't all. Now too comes
flavored water for dogs
in mouth watering tastes such as chicken, liver, and lamb.

What happened to the happy dog that would slaver over a simple bowl
of water from the tap? Dogs have not changed. Dogs now are pretty
much like the dogs we knew ten years ago. What changed, of course,
is people like you and me. We changed.

We are no longer content to buy bread in a bakery
(boulangerie) and
cheese in a cheese store
(fromagerie).
Instead we look for everything
pre-created to be as convenient as possible in a supermarket
(supermarché).
Is it any wonder then that the convenience and desire for creature
comforts would rub off onto our dogs?

All that is left of a car long ago dumped in the bay is
its axle. Normally it would remain invisible, but this day's
minus tide exposed the rusty axle for a while.

On the road to zero footprint consumerism the automobile
lags far behind. Tires are being recycled into playground
paths. Tennis shoes are being recycled into basketball court
floors. Aluminum cans are being recycled into aluminum cans.
But automobiles are still junked, crushed, and only partly
recycled. And along the road, each car will consume
almost a thousand gallons of gas per year.

The Tesla
electric car
can travel 200 miles on a charge and
only takes a few hours to charge. If you buy one they give you
a solar cell for the top of your garage or carport that provides
fifty miles of electricity per day. If you only commuted twenty-five
miles per day, you would only consume time and road surface.

By far the best way to travel is by rail. In Europe large cities
have extensive underground rail. In London and Paris, the underground
rail stations are only a few blocks from anywhere in town.
In San Francisco, the cost of putting rail underground has grown
so expensive that only one new mile is currently planned. The
longer we wait to put rail underground, the more expensive the task
grows. Because there is no circumstance that will make the task cheaper
in the future, all cities should bite the bullet and put all rail
underground now. Why in the world should we wait for the cost to
double before acting?

I was walking back to the boat and looked down a side street. In the
photo you might think it's a doorway but it is actually a window
several feet above the street. I saw this large dog looking out and
originally it was looking the other way. I focused on him, got the
picture framed then made that universal kissy noise that all, including the French,
make to call their dogs.
It worked. He whipped his head around and I got that great
curious look.
add a comment or report a mistake

Imagine a children's tale about a cute little
purple-cabbage that
went out for a night on the town. It was a blue moon that night,
just as it is tonight when we tell this tale. The cute little
purple-cabbage froliced through the garden, talking and laughing with
all the other fine vegetables there. One adventure followed
by another (such as when she was attacked by
French snails in
San Francisco). Later, just before dawn,
the cute little purple-cabbage fell sound asleep.

At dinner that night, the child's mother announced, "Tonight
we will become
vegetarians."

The mother describes to the child all the awful ways that animals
are
slaughtered to produce meat
for the table. So convincing is the
mother that the child weeps and promises never to eat meat again.

The child, anxious for dinner is surprised by a salad set on the table.
The top of the salad is littered with torn pieces of purple cabbage. The child
wails, "You slaughtered the cute little cabbage."